


And Now, In My Dreams

by Chaerring



Category: Inception (2010), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Arthur and Pepper may or may not be related, Bruce is a Chemist with Issues, Darcy is a Forger, Eames is a damn good teacher, Everyone in this fic is beautiful 'cept Obie, F/M, Gen, Inception Fusion, M/M, More tags coming because this work will be ridiculously long, Multi, Obadiah Stane is the biggest dick to ever dick, Pepper is Point, Steve is an Architect, Tony is the Extractor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 07:33:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaerring/pseuds/Chaerring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Avengers/Inception Fusion</p>
<p>Darcy is an inexperienced Forger who needs a job. </p>
<p>Tony and Pepper are trying to get Stark Industries back from the immoral grip of Obadiah Stane, but getting it back isn't enough. They want him to <i>give</i> it back, on a silver platter. </p>
<p>Steve is a soldier who happens to draw, and lost his lover to Stane's weapons dealing. Somehow he managed to get caught up in the whirlwind of Tony and Pepper's plans. </p>
<p>Bruce used to be one of the leading minds in government sponsored dreamshare, but something went wrong and he lost everything when he made a run for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Now, In My Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or the Inception concepts. It's all Marvel and Nolan. The title comes from a Brandi Carlile song.
> 
> Thanks to TheGreatSporkWielder for beta-ing!

Darcy loved to dream. She loved the way it felt to walk around in minds and hear the secrets of them whispered around her in the conversations of projections, or to take a leap into mid air and grow a fire escape under her feet. She adored the adrenaline rush. The danger, the thrill, the secrecy, all of it was everything she wanted from her life. Jane had warned her when she offered her the slightly left of legal internship about the dangers of dream sharing. People had gone mad, dropped into comas, and never come out, or in one old rumored case, accidentally created their own nightmares to haunt them daily through the rest of their lives. Those tales weren't even counting the problems that dream workers faced in real life. It wasn't illegal, because that would mean it could be brought to the courts, but it didn't mean people couldn't disappear. 

Darcy had taken all of that into consideration, even if she didn't quite learn everything until she'd been working with Jane and Erik for a month or so. She had processed the danger and considered giving it up after her first job when a friend of Erik's had dropped by their work site looking to see if they could use him. He was English, his name was Eames, and he was a Forger. She had fallen in love. Not with Eames, but with Forging. Erik and Jane had hired her to learn Point since Erik was trying to retire, and Jane was a one woman army of Architect, Extractor, and sometimes Chemist when they couldn't get their shipments of chemicals in time. Neither of them ever really wanted or took jobs that required Forging because it wasn't part of their skill set, but apparently Eames had liked her cheek and deigned to show her how. 

It was frustrating to Darcy at first as Eames showed her just how unobservant of other people she was. He taught her an attention to detail by making her copy things in reality, explaining that he never would have gotten a grip on dream Forgery if he wasn't already excellent at spotting and using the details of paper forgery. At first, she was tempted to call bullshit, but she stuck with the lessons and after a few grueling days of ink stains and paper cuts they started to pay off. It was like staring at endless lines of precisely copied letters had opened her eyes to the fine point details of the world. 

Beforehand, she had gotten the feeling that something was off about their current job, extracting something from a foreign prince's mind. Darcy still hadn't been told what exactly they were after. Now she could see from Erik's uneasiness and the multiple shorthand plans on his desk that Jane hadn't told him either. Jane was taking a lot longer than she usually did designing the levels, and Darcy could see not one, but two receipts from the palace tour groups hiding under her half built foam models. Darcy had gone with her once and kept the receipt, which meant Jane had gone twice again by herself. That, she had been told when she first signed on, was a good way to draw attention to yourself, and exactly what you didn't want. Jane was slipping up, and possibly stalling for time by delaying her designs., Darcy wanted to know why, but she hesitated to ask.

Instead she told Eames what she was seeing, and he agreed they could move onto the next thing she needed to learn, as long as she kept up the paper forging. Unsurprisingly, Darcy had to go from learning papers and inks to learning people and their mannerisms. It was never about the obvious tell, but about the more subtle ones,; but without the obvious the subtle tells wouldn't _be_ subtle. Eames explained that there was a trick to splitting your attention between your mark and the other people around them. It wasn't enough to know the person you were forging. The Forger, to be a good one, had to also know the people around their forge and they way they reacted to normal and abnormal behaviors in the forge. It was a good way to be able to check yourself on the job, or in practice, being able to see other people's reactions and adjust accordingly. 

It was difficult for Darcy at first to memorize and mimic people. Eames insisted she be able to mimic in reality before she even attempted to put on someone else's appearance in a dream. At first it was hard because she felt silly and rude, like she was mocking people constantly. Eames pointed out that she was going to have to can her conscience because it would only scream louder when she was pretending to be someone's loved one on a job. He gave her the option of sucking up her guilt and continuing or that she get out of the business entirely. Darcy took an hour to think about it, but really she had only needed a minute. She was selfish enough, addicted enough to the beauty and danger of dreaming that she knew she wouldn't give it up or enlist in some brain program where they _controlled_ what she had to dream about. Darcy came to the conclusion that she would treat each performance as an imitation of the real person. Imitation was the greatest form of flattery, after all.

After that the mimicry went a little easier and Eames started letting her try small things in dreams. 

It was easy at first, fun little games changing her coloring, clothes, or her shape just a little here and there. Just enough to make a difference, but still be recognizably _Darcy Lewis_. Eames said she learned that part even quicker than he had, which was excellent and meant she'd have a strong sense of self that wouldn't get lost in her real forgeries during long dreams once she got to that point. What she soon found out, however, was that a strong sense of self also made it harder for her to convincingly pull off a full personality and appearance change. It was easy to be Darcy Lewis in someone else's skin, or to be someone else in her own skin, but to stop being her own self, the woman she'd become entirely, was the hardest thing she had ever tried to do. 

Eventually, by talking back and forth with Eames for hours in a dream space of mirrors and costumes, they came up with a series of mental tricks and images that helped her. Putting on someone else was like dressing up in a costume, and acting like them just required her to put her own personality away in a mental case for protection. She just folded Darcy Lewis up like a ghostly sheet with holes for eyes and placed her in a box like the over taped gift boxes from department stores at the holidays. Darcy could open it up and pull herself back out at any time, but it was a good mental device to use to separate herself and her forge. She practiced. First, with familiar people like Jane and Erik succeeding in tricking each of them. Then, Eames set her to choosing her own forge. Stalking and learning about his behaviors until she could successfully convince Eames himself she was Harold Tucker. Darcy succeeded, passing his final test, and bid him farewell, eager to present ideas she had to Jane about using her new abilities in the job they still hadn't completed.

Of course, that was just in time for Jane to call a meeting and disband the dreaming team.

**Author's Note:**

> This is just an introductory chapter to set up Darcy's abilities and perspective. The beginning of the plot should happen next chapter. I meant to start off right away, but learning to forge apparently took over. The other members of the team not listed so far will definitely be mentioned if not actually making an appearance. Natasha, Clint, Coulson, and Fury are actually other dream workers.
> 
> I will be playing a little loose, and kind of fast with the Dreamsharing concepts and positions as they are presented in Inception to accommodate the particular unique abilities of the Marvel world. I have very little knowledge of the mind or the science of dreaming. I'll be doing a bit of research to help keep things a little accurate, but mostly I'll be flying by the seat of my pants, because, hey, it's fiction.


End file.
